


brute divine

by celoica



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cancer, Cannibalism, Horror, Loss of Virginity, Lovecraftian, M/M, Post-Dishonored (Video Game), Reincarnation, Suicide, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 17:40:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15272793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celoica/pseuds/celoica
Summary: He was clean, unmarred by the passing of time, by the sharp edges of knives and swords and brutal fists. Cut from virgin cloth, swathed in it.The Outsider paused. That wasn't right. There, in the eyes, dark and heavy from above the black mask obscuring his nose and eyes. There, in the slope of his shoulders, the crouched position he took on the top of the bell tower, the tight scrape of his hair pulled back from his face.There, on the scar blotting his left hand, a shape the Outsider was intimately familiar with.The boy raised his head, moonlight cutting across his face. He slipped two fingers under the fabric across his face, pulling it free. It settled around his throat like a collar.The Outsider wondered what sort of god possessed the kind of power to give a man like Corvo Attano a second life.





	brute divine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [festlich](https://archiveofourown.org/users/festlich/gifts).



> I'm, like, six years too late and I've only played the first game, so this is a mix-mash of canon and my own BS. Low chaos ending applies and diverges from there.
> 
> To the five people that read this: Y'all are great.

"My tenderness remained, lonely, enormous, unnecessary."  
—Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, from Selected Works;  _“Heavenly Words,”_

 

 

Corvo Attano died in his sleep, they said. He tucked in his youngest grandchild, kissed the soft curls from her forehead, and went to sleep, never to wake up again. He was found the next morning, still beneath perfect-pressed white sheets, skin pale, limbs stiff.

They mourned. His daughter, the children, the people. They took to the streets, wearing black, grieving the loss of a man they did not know. The stories of his transgressions and achievements were whispered and boasted for years, and now they were nothing but legends, quiet moments spun to extravagance. They prayed for him, left offerings of remembrance at the gates, crowding close to catch a glimpse of the Empress.

Growths, the physician had said, in his lungs, settling on his heart and invading his liver. A painful death, managed by copious morphine and whatever deadly concoction they could conjure up to prolong Corvo’s miserable life.

He had watched, in the end, in the dark, while Corvo had swallowed poison and climbed into his bed for the last time.

The Outsider peeled himself from the shadows, stepping out from the depths of the dark and into the dimly lit room. On a metal slab, covered from chin to toes in a white sheet, Corvo’s body lay, Emily crouched over him, dark hair trailing against his still chest.

He watched for a moment, head tilted, taking in the steady breaths Emily took. She touched his face, fingertips bare and gentle on his cheeks, nose, over the broad bone of his forehead. The Outsider inched closer, silent, hands tucked behind his back.

It had been decades. Once his mark—his name—had done its part for Corvo, he had stopped reaching for him. It had been understandable. Only desperate men reached out for the Void, and Corvo had been entirely desperate during the Reagent’s reign. When Emily had been saved, seated on the throne with her father at her right hand, safe and sound and no longer in dire need of a god’s touch.

It made sense. It was _understandable_.

It burned him to whatever was left of his core.

The Outsider edged close, quiet like a stalking cat, dispassionate as he looked over Corvo’s face. Lines etched into his face, grey-whiskered, pale underneath olive. Bloodless lips, hair carefully trimmed, sheared short to his scalp.

He remembered Corvo in his youth, grizzled and old before forty, softer in the skin and harder in soul. He’d been beautiful then, fierce and bloodied, drenched in vengeance and barely-concealed rage. The Outsider had wanted to lick it from his throat. Instead, he’d bestowed him his mark, as close to a claim as he could get.

“My dear Corvo,” the Outsider murmured, softly, to himself, and reached out a hand to hover over his chest.

Emily jerked away, taking short stumbling steps backward. Her face was drawn, lips thinned into an outraged flat line, eyes narrowed. She looked ready to sound the alarm—and then her eyes widened, dark and wide, the same shade as her father’s.

She stared in silence and the Outsider ignored her, brushing his knuckles down the soft plane of Corvo’s cheek. His fingers slipped into Corvo’s skin. Cold for hours, he felt lukewarm to the Outsider’s touch. His soul had been there, scant hours before, leaving a gentle impression of life, of fullness, of something _more_ than the husk stretched out on the table.

“I know you,” Emile said, finally, when long minutes had stretched between them. “I saw you once, at the coronation. You disappeared. I thought I was seeing things.

“I wanted you to see me,” he said simply, and withdrew his hand from Corvo’s face, head tilting to face Emily.

Her face was drawn again, shock melting away to something more ruthless, something that tasted of iron, heavy in the air. “What are you doing here?”

“Paying my respects.”

“For him?”

The Outsider nodded once, folding his hands behind his back again. “Is that such a shock?”

“You’re…” She trailed off, tearing her eyes away from him to look down at the body before them. Her mouth tightened, twisting into an ugly purse. “I didn’t expect you to come again. I thought you were done with us.”

“Incorrect.”

Emily cut him a hard look, flagrant disrespect, bright determination. Stubborn. “What reason does a god have to interfere with mortal concerns?”

“Death is my concern.”

“Then where were you when the war struck?” she asked, hands balled at her sides. “The plague? Or the water sickness after?”

“Those were not my concern.”

“But this is?”

“He is mine,” the Outsider said, glancing down. Corvo was still, quiet, like he was sleeping. He looked peaceful. “He has been mine since his conception. His death is my concern.”

“Where were you before?” Emily demanded, swaying for a moment. She leaned her weight forward, as if to launch toward him and invade his space, and then thought better of it. “You could have helped him.”

“He didn’t want help, Empress,” the Outsider said dismissively. “He would have come to you a year ago if he did.”

Her nostrils flared, lips parting around words that never came. Her shoulders slipped down a notch and she turned away from him, to look out the window, at the fat-hung moon, disturbingly bright. “You knew.”

“I know many things.”

“And you said nothing?”

“Tread lightly, Empress,” he said, voice still soft, leveled, roused to the bare minimum of conversation. “I do not play favourites.”

She snorted—unladylike, unprepossessing. Her chin tipped in the moonlight and she said, “You are here, are you not?”

The Outsider said nothing. He turned his attention to the corpse on the table, bare beneath the sheet, devoid of all the energy that had been locked inside Corvo Attano’s body. He touched him all the same, knuckles and fingertips butterfly kissing his cheeks and chin, the tender bow of his mouth.

She was not wrong. He knew that, understood it, was well-versed in his attachment to the human. Bestowing his mark to those who interested him was nothing new. It was all there was to do. Time passed differently for him. No longer human—a god, an entity, barely humanoid when he stretched himself to the furthest edges of capacity—and in need of such restraints, his existence was defined by amusements. If it amused, he would look. When it stopped, he turned to the next interest, the next human to open their eyes to the brink of _something_.

They disappointed. It was in their nature to disappoint. The Outsider had seen the cruelty in man long before he’d been a god. Time and time again, selfish whims and desires overruled whatever goodness they were born with. Perhaps some weren’t born with any. Perhaps whatever had created them—after the Void, long after the ones who had slumbered there had perished—had meant it to be so. The Outsider had never thought to question it; humans were humans, and the Outsider only cared enough for what amused.

Corvo had amused. Amused, bemused, intrigued.

And now he was dead.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Outsider said, head tilting in Emily’s direction. She stood with folded arms, mouth trained into a thin line, eyes hard as stone. “He is gone now.”

“Then why are you here?”

“His heart.”

Emily inhaled sharply through her nose, arms tightening across her chest. Her face remained unchanged. Hard and flat, demanding and regal. “You cannot have it.”

“How do you propose to stop me?”

Her hands fell to her sides, fingers curling into her fists. “Why do you want it?”

“You ask many questions.”

“You answer few.”

The Outsider stared back at her, impassive, and asked, “What reason does a mortal have to interfere with godly concerns?”

Her jaw pulsed. Her eyes were ice, the full force of a glacier pressing in on him. There was no curiosity. There was no touch of interest in her words, no desire to know why. There was only the weight of her eyes, the sharp points she drilled into him with the intensity of her focus.

The Outsider remained unflinching.

 _I won’t let you_ , her eyes said.

_You have no say._

_He’s my father._

_How will you stop me?_ his own asked.

It was possible for him to stand there forever, until Emily aged and withered, became nothing but bone, and then, finally, dust. Corvo’s body would rot and wither the same way. His heart would go with his other organs, seeping in his own decomposition, stewing in his own innards while his outside bloated and broke apart. His heart would be nothing but food for the ground. His heart would be useless.

It was possible for him to slip between the fabric of time, to collect Corvo’s heart and flee without another word. He would disappear from sight—from the Kaldwins’ lives—and the moment would be nothing but another fleeting memory, to be buried along with the moment he had slipped his hand into Jessamine’s chest.

Emily’s mouth trembled, a shake as deep as an earthquake. She swallowed, an exaggerated bob in her long throat. The Outsider stared until she asked, “Do you need a knife?”

“Nothing so primitive,” the Outsider said, eyes turning from Emily to Corvo’s body. “Burn his body when you’re done. Don’t bury it.”

He slid closer, the soles of his feet touching the ground. He moved to the head of the slab, hands gentle on the sides of Corvo’s face. Corvo’s corpse stared up at him, eyes closed, face solemn and silent. Emily watched, hands falling to her side in clenched balls, as the Outsider flitted his fingertips across Corvo’s mouth in the pantomime of a kiss, tucked his thumbs between Corvo’s teeth and pried his jaw open.

From the corner of his eye, he could see the way Emily swayed forward, protest tight in each line of her body, in the stiff way her jaw set itself. Corvo’s teeth scraped over his knuckles as the Outsider forced his fingers into his mouth. It was damp and cold, saliva slicking his skin. Emily jerked, taking a step back, and the Outsider cupped Corvo’s jaw, loving and tender, until his knuckles disappeared past Corvo’s lips.

Once, what felt like a thousand years ago, the Outsider had plucked Jessamine Kaldwin’s heart from her chest, after the autopsy, before the embalming began. It had been easy to slip the stitches from her chest and reach inside, the taste of rust and iron lingering in the air, sweetly cloying. It had been nothing to him to deposit the heart, cold and useless, into Piero Joplin’s hands.

It was violation of the highest degree.

The Outsider, by virtue of his making and nature, was unnatural. Everything he did was unnatural, from the marks left on bodies and the hollow song that echoed from his bones when he slid under the water next to the whales. His hand worked down Corvo’s throat, painfully tight with death if he could still feel pain, and then his wrist and forearm, pushing through tissue and muscle, swimming in the blood of Corvo Attano, was an unnatural violation.

Emily’s breaths stuttered next to the Outsider. She had drifted closer, hands clasped tightly in front of her, eyes wide. The Outsider ignored her, the obscene bulge in Corvo’s throat twisting as he rotated his arm and clenched his fingers around Corvo’s heart. It was cold, smooth, bumpy with excess tissue. He cut his nails along the valves until the heart held its place by his hand along.

His arm appeared from Corvo’s mouth, his wrist, bloody red and thickly coated, and then his knuckles, clenched tight around the heart to guard it from the bite of Corvo’s teeth. They scraped into the Outsider’s skin. When he wrenched his hand free, clumps of blood glopping down the Outsider’s arm, falling to the floor.

Cradling the heart in his hands, he ran his thumbs over the organ, through the mess of jelly-red blood clinging to it. It clogged the valves he’d cut. He touched it tenderly, gently, with reverence, careful as he touched the distended edge of a tumour.

He bit into it. Emily gasped. Metallic and bright on his tongue, he chewed it off with his teeth and swallowed. White-faced and horrified, she stared as the Outsider turned Corvo’s heart over in his hands and bit into another tumour, ripping and tearing into muscle until it rolled free on his tongue.

It followed the other, making its way down his throat. They settled in his hollow stomach as he stroked over the heart, knitting the tissue back together with a gentle touch. It smoothed over, filling out, until the ragged edges touched and there was nothing but smooth muscle beneath his thumbs.

Blood—Corvo’s blood—lay heavy on his tongue, smeared across his lips and chin. It splattered like gelatin to the ground when he turned his heart over.

Emily took a step back, heels heavy on the stone floor.

“What _are_ you?” she breathed, wide-eyed.

Terror. The Outsider was familiar with it. His oldest friend, his most welcomed companion.

He smiled, bloody teeth on display like a wild predator rejoicing in its kill. “A god.”

 

 

The water sickness came again two years later, in the middle of a drought. The young, sickly and elderly went first. The bodies were burned, ashes buried outside Dunwall’s limits, and those who survived the first twenty-four hours were moved to the Greaves Refinery, nursed to health or death by the few who braved the sickness.

The hunger clawed across the Gristol, the city murmuring with need. The dead piled on the streets, overflowing on the corners, black-blooded and unholily grey-tinged skin translucent in the sunlight. Those immune to the sickness withered as the crops did, disappearing into themselves, bones protruding and skin pulled taunt, as grey as those laying on the streets.

In the dark of the secret room connected to the Royal Chambers, the Empress constructed an altar of finery to the Outsider. Thick purple fabric hung against the stone wall, a hand-carved table of gharuwood from the depths of Pandyssia, gems and jewels and precious metals from Tyvia. Treasures stolen from enemies hundreds of years ago, passed down from one emperor to another.

Her blood, spilled in a moment of desperation when her eldest daughter fell to the sickness.

The Outsider ignored her.

 

 

The world turned and righted itself as it always did. The Outsider had seen enough in over three thousand years of existence to know it always did. The dreams came, visions of destruction and chaos when he drifted in the Void, eyes open and unseeing but the images that slipped through his mind. Water sickness, bodies bloated and swollen with boils, laid out across the Empire. The Kaldwins dead in their fortress, the rats swallowing down what was left of their decaying bodies.

The Empress headed to the Far Continent, bringing back a cure. The images of the end of times vanished from the Outsider’s mind, replaced by new ones.

The world righted itself and continued to turn.

 

 

The Empress was laid to rest in the morning, replaced by her son in the evening. The coronation was beautiful. The Outsider watched from the Void as the boy praised his mother in his speech, eyes shining. His jaw was Corvo’s, the slant of his eyes, the strength in his brow. His voice was higher, bred of little difficulties in life. Even the water sickness was forgotten after three decades.

He spoke of peacetimes, of strengthening bonds with their allies, of bringing opportunities to those in the lower districts. He spoke like a king.

The whelp in his mother’s stomach, standing, dressed in regal plum and drenched in the jewels of the Kaldwins, would be the doom of them all.

The Outsider smiled.

 

 

“There’s a girl,” the crown prince said, young and soft, filled to the brim with hopes and dreams and new love. Nero Redivivus come to life, trapped inside the body of a tender-hearted boy.

There was a girl, bright-eyed and dark-haired, who worked in the kitchens. An unsuitable match for anything but the foolish trysts of youth, he was in love. Deeply and truly, maddeningly in love. The kind of love that could set the entire world ablaze.

The crown prince’s dipped as he smiled, shy even in the presence of a god, and asked, “Do you know what I mean?”

The boy looked like Corvo, a vague touch of something so viscerally like the dead man. It was in the jaw, the hairline, the depth of his skin. His eyes were the same. Dark brown, almost black, bottomless pits that more than once the Outsider had fallen into, drowning in the entire weight of the ocean.

The Outsider tipped his head in response and thought of the heart buried in the heart of the Void, in the place that no one but the Outsider had touched in millenniums.

“Your love will be remembered by history,” the Outsider said, watching the boy’s smile break into something luminous. “It will be legendary.”

Taking the Outsider’s mark, he pledged himself to his kitchen girl. The Outsider peered in from the view. He watched them kiss, exchange words of promise. He watched the time the crown prince turned back when he slipped, erasing the bruises on his kitchen girl’s mouth and cheeks, the blistered skin of her hands when he held them over an open flame.

From the quiet, he watched the crown prince turn into a monster.

A whale called, bellowing deep within the Void.

 

 

He did not watch the Fall of Dunwall. The images that had come before, decades before the moment, when the Emperor who had stolen the throne had been simply a spark, were enough.

The blood on the throne, familial and strong, the bodies tossed into the ocean out of contempt. The riots, the hunger, the public executions. The violence that lingered like iron in the air, heavy on the shoulders of civilians who tried to flee. The tyranny spilled from the walls the Emperor erected around the city, washing to Redmoor and Baleton, wiping away all those who opposed him.

The Abbey in Gristol collapsed under the Emperor’s rule and those left worshiping the faith sought refuge in Serkonos and Morley. They whispered in the ear of Tyvia prince, and when a revolution broke, the council slaughtered in their chamber, another bloodstained throne appeared on the Isles.

From the quiet of the Void, the Outsider watched them destroy each other. The great empire they built buckled under the pressure of the slaughter, of the deafening bombs and echoing calamity. It collapsed, in gunfire and smoke, in the haze of broken bodies and prayers unanswered.  

They called him name, right until the end. Children sacrificed on altars of purple in moments of chaotic desperation, their lifeless limbs given up to him in his own name. They whispered his name in death, before the firing squad, when the Morley army invaded. They screamed for him, begging for help and salvation and any scrap of redemption he could pledge to them.

The Emperor cried for him, in the end, buried beneath the rubble of his fallen fortress. His limbs crushed and severed, eye lolling from the socket. He choked on the toxic dust and the crumbling concrete. He called for his mother, the father he had dispatched himself, the two brothers who had hung on his orders.

He cried for the Outsider.

The Outsider stroked his fingertips over the heart buried in the Void, as fond as a lover’s touch, and did not watch the last of the Kaldwins die.

 

 

A decade passed and then another, until there were children who remembered nothing but the starvation and the war, the echo of gunfire in the moonlight and the hollow whiz of bombs landing in their towns. They knew nothing of the great city of Dunwall, of the Kaldwin dynasty that had brought both their greatest peace and greatest downfall.

An empty shell of its former self, its residents fought a war amongst themselves.

They called for him. They always do.

No one wore his mark. He kept that to himself, as close as the heart that hasn’t beat in nearly one hundred years.

They called for him. Loudly. Begging, on their knees. When the winter hit, they begged louder, more children—as young as a newborn babe, pink and blood-smeared—laid across shrines in his name as they begged for salvation. Sometimes they walked the streets and called for him, a banshee wail calling to whatever is left inside his bones.

They didn’t need shrines. They never did. He could always hear them, vibrating along his being, as woven into his existence as the Void itself.

In the decaying bones of the Clocktower, a boy in black and blue laid a bone charm on a makeshift shrine made of damp, rotting wood and a threadbare curtain that had once hung in the great hall of the Tower. Candles flickered in the wind, lighting up the dusky skin of the boy’s arms as he rolled his sleeves over his forearms.

The Outsider felt the vibration along his being, the parts of him that stretched over his being like skin. It contained him, gave him shape, to pass as one of those he watched with mild disinterest. It echoed inside of him, reaching out in the Void like a siren’s call.

It was familiar, achingly so.

Slipping into the Clocktower, he watched from the dark of the ceiling.

A knife was drew from the boy’s belt, silent as he raised a calloused hand above the bone charm. He sliced into the fleshiest part of his palm, the tip of the knife twisting until rivets of blood swelled and spilled, great, fast drops of red hitting the bone charm when he squeezed his palm. He set the knife next to him.

The Outsider watched, quiet. When he stretched himself, the edges of his skin bleeding into twisted darkness, he could feel nothing from the boy. No cold or warmth, no taste of life.

That was new.

That was interesting.

The Outsider studied him as the boy wiped his hand on a rust-stained cloth, wrapping it about his palm. He stepped away from the altar slowly, toward the moonlight pouring in front the broken window. His skin glinted, dusky and olive, tanned despite the chill of winter starting its journey into Gristol. The boy crouched in the broken window, unharmed hand clutching the wall for balance.

He was clean, unmarred by the passing of time, by the sharp edges of knives and swords and brutal fists. Cut from virgin cloth, swathed in it.

The Outsider paused. That wasn't right. There, in the eyes, dark and heavy from above the black mask obscuring his nose and eyes. There, in the slope of his shoulders, the crouched position he took on the top of the bell tower, the tight scrape of his hair pulled back from his face.

There, on the scar blotting his left hand, a shape the Outsider was intimately familiar with.

The boy raised his head, moonlight cutting across his face. He slipped two fingers under the fabric across his face, pulling it free. It settled around his throat like a collar.

The Outsider wondered what sort of god possessed the kind of power to give a man like Corvo Attano a second life.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr @ celoica.


End file.
